8 - The rule of the judges

Summary

In the medieval federation of the Crown of Aragon, Valencia was decidedly the junior partner. Though there had been a Moorish kingdom there before, it was really during the 1230s and 1240s that Valencia acquired its modern form under the stern rule of its great founder Jaime the Conqueror. A frontier territory with a large, infidel population, it owed its continued survival to the power of the king.

The basis of that power was finance. Though the royal demesne was progressively whittled away by alienations to the nobility, it remained substantial enough in Habsburg times. Around two-thirds of the Crown's revenues came from the quit-rents, regalías and tercio diezmos of the agrarian hinterland. The rest came mainly from a monopoly of salt, and from the customs dues known as the Peatge and Quema which belonged to it by hereditary right independent of any parliamentary grant. Philip II considerably expanded this patrimony by annexing the mastership of the Military Order of Montesa in 1587, which brought him considerable patronage and increased his revenues by about a sixth. From all these sources the Crown had an income which was the envy of ministers in other parts of the Crown of Aragon, ‘such huge sums’, according to Escolano in 1610, ‘that it can pay all the costs of government and still have enough left over for the salaries of the viceroys and inquisitors of Zaragoza and Barcelona, as well as for pensions to a whole host of people’.